Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.

It is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card independently of the computer's original operating system. It is Free Software and based on Debian GNU/Linux.

Tails is a live operating system, that you can start on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card. It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity, and helps you to:

use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship; all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network; leave no trace on the computer you are using unless you ask it explicitly; use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, emails and instant messaging.

New in version 2.6

New features We enabled address space layout randomization in the Linux kernel (kASLR) to improve protection from buffer overflow attacks. We installed rngd to improve the entropy of the random numbers generated on computers that have a hardware random number generator. Upgrades and changes Upgrade Tor to 0.2.8.7. Upgrade Tor Browser to 6.0.5. Upgrade to Linux 4.6. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.) Upgrade Icedove to 45.2.0. Upgrade Tor Birdy to 0.2.0. Upgrade Electrum to 2.6.4. Install firmware for Intel SST sound cards (firmware-intel-sound). Install firmware for Texas Instruments Wi-Fi interfaces (firmware-ti-connectivity). Remove non-free APT repositories. We documented how to configure additional APT repositories using the persistent volume. Use a dedicated page as the homepage of Tor Browser so we can customize it for our users. Set up the trigger for RAM erasure on shutdown earlier in the boot process. This should speed up shutdown and make RAM erasure more robust. Fixed problems Disable the automatic configuration of Icedove when using OAuth. This should fix the automatic configuration for GMail accounts. (#11536) Make the Disable all networking and Tor bridge mode options of Tails Greeter more robust. (#11593) For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues For some users memory wiping fails more often than in Tails 2.5, and for some users it fails less often. Please report any such changes to #11786. See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 2.6 To install, follow our installation instructions. To upgrade, an automatic upgrade is available from 2.5 to 2.6. If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if you fail to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.